Maxtor DiamondMax 10: Exploring NCQ & RAID

Our friends over at Hot Hardware are using a 250GB DiamondMax 10 SATA-II drive as a guinea pig for Native Command Queuing and RAID testing. Other participants in the test include a 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 and a 74GB Raptor:

The performance improvement offered by NCQ and a faster SATA interface on the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 line of drives is more evolutionary than revolutionary when compared to the DiamondMax 9. And these new features are still not enough for the new Maxtor drives to take the overall performance spot from the Western Digital WD740GD Raptor drives.

However, when pairing the new NCQ enabled Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives with the Intel ICH7 integrated RAID controller in the right combinations and quantities, some very impressive performance numbers start to emerge. The maximum theoretical combined transfer rate of three Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives is 450 MB/s. In a RAID 0 configuration with a 4K stripe size, we recorded a burst speed of 343 MB/s, which is about 75% of the theoretical limit.